Organic traffic still down 9 months after redesign

[ShaMenz]

Hi Carlton,

Awesome answers from everyone here!

I just wanted to add that it appears there is only the one 302 redirect that has been incorrectly placed, but of course it is an important one as 302 redirects do not pass link value, so any external site that happens to have linked to your non-www domain will not be adding value to your link profile.

Also, this page http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america, although appearing to be fine when viewed in the browser, is returning a 500 Error for crawlers (Internal Server Error). You will need to get your tech people to sort this out for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RyanKent]

Sha? Do you have a tool which scans all pages on a website looking for redirects? Or are you using a crawler?

[ShaMenz]

Hey Ryan,

Just using Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It has proven very reliable and quickly identifies errors, server status for every page and much more.

The caveat is that I always check any Status code errors in the browser as there are quite often situations like this where the server is returning a Status error when the page renders fine in the browser.

You just have to be careful to ensure that if you want to scan the root domain you use the non-www URL as usual.

Hope it's useful,

Sha

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the tip! You convinced me.

I had read Pete's article on the topic but it wasn't enough to motivate me to go and download it. Thanks for sharing.

[ShaMenz]

Wow! I'll take that as a compliment

Just don't tell Dr Pete!

Always easier to switch on to something when you see it produce a real result. Glad I could help.

Have a great night,

Sha

[FrontlineMobility]

Flawless roundhouse kick good sir.

[EGOL]

To assess longtail traffic gain or loss, I simply look at the number of keywords that deliver traffic during Month A and compare that to the number of keywords delivering traffic during Month B.

[csmithal]

Sha,

Thank you for the Screaming Frog tool. It showed that several pages - including the HOMEPAGE - were noodp & noydir - I have no idea how this happened. Nevertheless, they have been resurrected.

How much damage do you think my homepage being set as noodp, noydir has done to my rankings?

[csmithal]

EGOL,

Would you be referring to Traffic Sources > Keywords report?
For example,

September 2011:
Search sent 6,200 total visits via 2,427 keywords
Non-paid keywords: 1,147
Paid: 137
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,168
*The above is an advanced segment I use.

September 2010:
Search sent 7,804 visits via 1,279 keywords.
Non-paid: 1,186
Paid: 3,954
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,020

This seems to reveal that things may not be as dire as I thought.
I did have less PPC spend July-Sept year-over-year.

[EGOL]

That is a source of the information that I was thinking about.

I use ClickTracks and get a similar report (with a full list of keywords).

[RyanKent]

If I can jump in, I would say no damage at all.

noodp and noydir merely tell Google not to use your site's information for title and meta descriptions rather then your DMOZ or Yahoo directory information. This option has less importance nowadays since Google is more aggressively changing those tags on their own.

[RyanKent]

I like the idea of ClickTrack but unfortunately the product is no longer offered in a standalone form. It has been integrated into a platform designed to assist with e-mail marketing. The packaging solution is expensive (4 figures) and requires a annual contract.

[EGOL]

Yep...  Just saying what I use... other people will probably want to find their own solution.

I was lucky to get the ClickTracks log file analysis program a long time ago... It was really expensive but has served me well for years.

You can get a wimpy log file analysis program at weblogexpert.com ... I use it for simple reports.

[ShaMenz]

yep...what he said

The most obvious reason for using noodp and noydir is to stop the search engine from using information from those directory listings (which may be out of date), but Google is choosing to return what it thinks" most accurately represent the content on the page these days. Sometimes that might be what you provide in your Titles and tags, sometimes not.

Sha

[AlanMosley]

My sort of Music

[AlanMosley]

I cant really add to what Egal and Ryan has said. but i sent you a detailed report of some technical issues via your email from your website as my bit to help. Since you are using a cms yo will proably never get rid of them all, but there are some easy ones to fix, broken hyperlinks and generic non relevant link text. Never waste link text.

[texmeix]

This is great feedback. I too have my site on Drupal and have had multiple SEOs tell me that a CMS-driven site will not rank as well as a static HTML site. My question is this, if you had the exact same site on Drupal or any other CMS vs the same content on a traditional static HTML site, is there anything inherently inferior to the CMS site as it relates to SEO? I realize back before CMS had the ability to serve search engine friendly URLS and before canonical link tag was introduced the CMS could be considered sloppy and full of duplicate content, but that argument doesn't seem to hold as much merit anymore. On a purely apples to apples comparison of sites from Static HTML vs CMS does HTML still have an advantage?

Thank you

michael

[RyanKent]

**On a purely apples to apples comparison of sites from Static HTML vs CMS does HTML still have an advantage? **

Yes and No. It depends on what kind of advantages you refer to. Do you mean cleaner code? Faster updates? Costs to manage? Time? Ranking?

A CMS outputs HTML code. Whether you use Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, .NET or one of the dozens of other CMS, HTML code is being output. The code that is output will always be conformed to specific standards based on the CMS.

The good - the code can always be adjusted.

The bad - you may have to alter core files which would need to be reviewed after every CMS update.

An example: when Google introduces a new feature (authorship, canonical urls, etc) if you have a static html site you simply add the new code and you are done. With a CMS the changes are more complex. With that said, you can usually wait a short bit and someone will create an extension, or update an existing extension, which will offer that functionality.

If we move from theoretical to practical, most CMS-based websites are not professionally developed or maintained. Accordingly, there are tons of coding issues which cause a variety of problems.

Are you asking about a dynamic (i.e. database driven) site vs a static site? If so, a database driven site would have advantages of being able to offer a local search widget whereas a static site would not be able to offer that feature. That is just one example.

[texmeix]

This is perfect Ryan, just the type of response I was hoping to find. My website is a database driven website and my opinion has been that the platform does not have nearly as much influence (if any) on organic rankings as the SEO working on the site.

In most every case where I've found an SEO related issue in a open source cms someone else has experienced it too and has already built a solution...and if it's new technology, like you said, an extension is usually soon to follow. The main concern I had and criticism I am trying to refute is that "because my site is built in drupal, it cannot/will not ever perform as well as a static HTML non-dynamic site"

I think your response helped answer this question, but I'd always be interested in additional feedback and other SEOMoz opinions on this matter. I was going to start my own post on this topic, but it seemed to fit so well with this ongoing discussion.

Thanks

[RyanKent]

My company site is built in Joomla. It is undergoing a few changes including updating to HTML 5 / CSS 3 and a complete redesign. When it is 100% complete and ready to launch, I will put the site forth for discussion on this very topic. I have always worked to ensure we use valid code and so forth, but I have not used Microsoft's IIS tool to check for violations. At Alan's suggestion, I will do so for this site. I contend a professionally developed Jooma / WordPress / Drupal / etc site can perform as well as a hand-coded site BUT 95%+ of CMS sites are not professionally developed in my experience.

Just because a site owner hired a web developer to create the site does not mean it was professionally developed any more than hiring an SEO for consulting means you will receive professional results. This is my take on the topic. I am sure there are countering views.